The Opposite of Love (18 page)

It had been almost thirty years already. Perhaps it was time.

And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.

—Erica Jong

Chapter Eleven

She could count on both hands how many times she’d allowed herself to think about it in the past. Perhaps this was because when she did, she remembered things in a certain way, a way that was different from the rest of her memories. From the moment she woke up on that unusually warm morning in November, she remembered every detail, every conversation and intonation, every movement and expression, everything. Painful, horrific, complete memories.

She’d lain awake in her bed that morning, the Sunday after Thanksgiving, scanning the corkboard above her desk filled with pictures of her school friends, of her parents and sisters, and in the back of her mind she was waiting for the central heat to kick on again before she got out of bed. When ten minutes went by and it hadn’t come on, she realized her face wasn’t cold and she pushed the covers off. It was only seven a.m., so her sisters would still be asleep, but Melanie was hungry and there was always something good for breakfast on the weekends.

True to form, dad was in the kitchen reading the newspaper; a full bowl of pancake batter sat on the counter next to the griddle. The girls all woke up on their own clocks and were encouraged to do so on the weekends. Their father had said he didn’t want anyone to feel left out if they slept as much as their active, growing bodies needed, and so breakfast was served from around six or seven—whenever Dad got up—to ten-thirty.

Dad was about halfway through with his own pancakes when Melanie shuffled into the kitchen in her ducky slippers and blue-and-white striped pajamas. Her father jumped up from the table and scooped her up onto his hip. He never groaned or huffed when he lifted her, no matter how big she got, and she was always surprised by his strength. She couldn’t remember when he’d stopped lifting Sarah up, and she thought that must have been a very sad day for her.

“Did you have sweet dreams, beautiful?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Hungry?”

Melanie nodded.

“Pancakes today. Two or three?”

“Three,” she said. He turned his head and she gave him a peck on the cheek before he put her down.

She got the orange juice from the fridge and poured a glass before sitting down in the seat to the right of her father’s. Sarah used to sit across from her, but when Jen turned two, she started crying every time they sat down to a meal because she wanted to be next to her daddy. It was a six-person table, so there had always been an empty seat, and it was always at their mother’s end of the table. Before the baby came along, both chairs on their mother’s end had been empty, so Melanie guessed she was used to it. Catherine had seemed regal sitting at the end of the table monitoring her brood, especially by comparison to their father, who was always pulling pranks and making jokes. And while she would shoot stern looks and shake her head in mock disapproval, they all knew she was just playing straight man to daddy’s clown.

Of course, the only thing you could do to get her sincerely riled was to eat with your hands. Therefore, Catherine never served fried chicken, ribs, corn on the cob, tacos, or burgers. She relented on chips and dip during parties and games—but only because she didn’t want to look nuts in front of guests—and would also allow pizza for the family once in a while, as long as everyone promised to eat it with a knife and fork. It was on occasions like this that the girls would behave themselves like perfect angels, fearing otherwise that they’d never taste a pizza in their parents’ home again. But their father would wait until their mother was looking right at him and he’d pick up the last bit of pizza crust from his plate with his fingers and pop it happily into his mouth.

Of course Catherine would go nuclear on him and swear never to have pizza in the house again, but all involved knew full well that she would never punish the girls for their father’s behavior. That’s what made him so giddy, Melanie figured, that he knew he’d get away with it.

The house they lived in was a split-level ranch with a swimming pool in the backyard surrounded by palm trees, and the girls fantasized that they were on a beach in California rather than in the thick of the Mojave Desert. Her mother had always told the story at dinner parties of how they’d stood on that barren land at six-thirty on a balmy summer morning in 1975, in the area that would one day be known as Green Valley. The breeze was pleasant that morning and the temperature mild as the sun came over the eastern mountains and set the western mountains ablaze. In the distance, Red Rock Canyon was positively breathing with life, and the closer hills were glowing with an ethereal energy that was palpable. Catherine would always tell her dinner guests that they knew it was just for them, glancing at her husband with uncharacteristic wistfulness. They built their dream home in an area that was practically deserted—with dirt roads and plumbing they’d had to lay themselves—and the rest of the city gradually built out to meet them over the coming years.

Melanie’s nine-year-old mind had blamed the construction industry for her father’s death. She’d also blamed the bicycle industry, the real estate industry, even the weather industry—i.e. God—and she vowed to avoid all of them. She did a good job of it for a while, even after she admitted to herself that it was no one’s fault but her own.

As she finished her pancakes, she asked her father if he would go on a bike ride, just with her, no sisters.

“Why don’t you want your sisters to come?”

“They’re not even up yet. The game starts at one and I want to go for a ride first. Please?”

The invocation of the Bears game made her father smile, and of course, won her case, even though they would’ve had plenty of time to wait for her sisters. Her mother scowled, but she agreed to take over pancake duty. Melanie was only allowed to ride to the closest main street by herself, which was less than a mile, but with her father she could go as far as she liked. She loved the adventure of it, and something about her sisters’ competitive chattiness would’ve ruined it for her.

They’d started out heading north toward Sunset Boulevard and turned left toward Eastern. They rode leisurely, side-by-side and they played their usual game of tag. Her father would reach out and try to tap her, and she would try to dodge, but if he got her it was her turn. You got more points if you tagged the other person on the first try, so it helped to catch them off guard. For this reason, sometimes ten or twenty minutes would go by without an attempt.

Her father had tagged her as they turned south onto Eastern, which she thought was crappy since she was looking the other way to check for cars.

“So what made you want my company this fine morning?” her father asked.

Melanie shrugged.

“Something you wanna talk about?” he asked.

“No. Just don’t feel like hearing Sarah talk about her crappy friends and Jenny talk about her crappy dolls.”

“I see,” he said. “Is there anything crappy going on in your life these days?”

She shrugged. The truth was, everything was fine. She just wanted more time with him. She always wanted more time with him.

The year before, her father had sat them all down and tried to teach them the intricacies of football. The divine beauty of the spiral pass was intertwined with a life lesson on keeping things simple. The complexity and urgency of the two-minute drill were explained as metaphors for finishing strong in any endeavor. The girls squirmed and whined and begged to be doing something else, anything else, having no interest in sports or life lessons. Melanie was no exception, and she went along with her sisters’ objections until they were all dismissed. But she would sneak back into the living room and curl up next to her father on the sofa while he watched the Bears play. When it was just her, he didn’t make such a production out of it and turn the living room into a classroom.

The first few Sundays, Melanie just sat quietly and watched. She learned enough of what was good and bad for the Bears by her father’s outbursts and barely muffled cursing. But when a Bears’ score was taken back by a referee during a particularly close game, sending her father pacing the living room gripping fistfuls of his hair, she asked what happened. He stopped pacing, let go of his hair, and smiled. Just like that.

He sat back down on the couch and put his arm around her and explained the difference between possession and incomplete, the two feet in bounds, the push-out rule, the control of the ball versus bobbling. She giggled when he said ‘bobbling,’ which made him giggle too. When he waited for her to ask questions about the game, she retained most of what he told her, and by mid-way through the season, she was cheering and booing right along with him, even insulting the referees under her breath the same way he did, but without the swearing.

When her sisters heard how much fun she and Dad were having, they wanted in. But their father had changed the rules. If they wanted to watch football, they could sit and watch quietly and then ask questions, just like Melanie had. But this was about football, it was serious business. It was not about having fun; fun was just an occasional side effect.

Sarah and Jenny tried to watch; they really hated to miss out on a good time with their father. But they could only stare at the screen and daydream, and eventually gave up. And for the rest of his life, the Bears belonged to Melanie and her father alone.

It was November 25th when he died, and the Bears were playing the Vikings that afternoon. But on top of their time together in front of the TV, she wanted a bike ride alone with him. It occurred to her to make up something to talk about in order to justify being out without her sisters, something serious that she’d need privacy for. But she really didn’t want to lie to him either. So she just rode along beside him on the mostly deserted roads of the southeast end of Las Vegas. She never saw the game of course, but she heard the Bears won.

The following year, the Bears would go 15-1 in the regular season, their only loss coming against the Miami Dolphins on December 2nd, a week after the anniversary of her father’s death. Melanie watched every game on the sofa, in her same spot next to her father’s indentation, always alone. But toward the end of the season, when momentum was building toward the playoffs, the rest of her family joined her in the living room, and that’s when the loss happened. Her mother and sisters didn’t watch again after that. Not even the Super Bowl.

As Melanie sat in the living room watching the Super Bowl by herself, alternately hurling herself off the couch in fits of disgust, then screaming in bouts of ecstasy, her sisters remained in their rooms with their radios turned off, trying to gauge the score by Melanie’s outbursts. Their mother was in the kitchen doing the same.

The Bears beat the Patriots forty-six to ten and the moment the final whistle blew, Melanie’s sisters and mother materialized and flung themselves at her, mauling her on the living room sofa, all of them crying.

After the accident, Melanie had been driven to the hospital by the woman who’d called the ambulance. Melanie’s mother arrived shortly after her and filled out forms while Melanie stared out a window. Frenchman Mountain rose to its pointed peak in the distance, one of her father’s favorite places to hike.

They stood when the doctor came out to the waiting room. He was brash, rude even, Melanie thought, as though he was angry. His accent was slightly foreign and his enormous eyebrows were so thick they seemed mere days from obscuring his eyes completely. Surely those monstrosities obstructed his vision, Melanie thought.

She stared at the eyebrows as the doctor spoke to Melanie’s mother, but they never moved, even with his angry tone. What could he be so upset about? As far as actual words, she only heard “…lost too much blood at the scene…”

Blood. Scene. Maybe they could go back and get it. But that didn’t make sense; hospitals carried extra. Her mother swooned into the arms of the friend who’d driven her to the hospital, and the doctor walked away.

Oh. Oh. I see
. Melanie sat down hard in a waiting room chair.
It’s too late now. You can’t fix it.

At the wake, people had arrived in hordes. Melanie was dumbfounded by the number of people who turned out. Fellow professors, students, neighbors, even people who knew him from the gym. None of these people were family, and her father’s ashes would be interred in Chicago at his family plot. But there must have been two hundred people who came through the house that day to pay their respects and drink tea.

Melanie’s mother had welcomed the guests and accepted their condolences stoically, guiding them to the food and beverage tables in the dining room and kitchen. Some of the adults had given Melanie
that
look. Sometimes with a nod. That “now you know” look. The one that made her wish she could just be nine again. But it wasn’t the age she missed, it wasn’t nine that had disappeared overnight, it was the not knowing how cruel grief could be.

Everyone seemed to be waiting for her to do something. To cry, or to scream, or to set herself on fire—she didn’t know what. She had no clue how she was supposed to act. Sarah locked herself in her room. Jenny wailed herself into a hibernating sleep in a corner of the sofa where she would remain for hours, completely oblivious to the throngs of people around her. Melanie watched her mother—now and for weeks after—to gauge how to behave. She decided that she should be doing something, keeping busy, in motion like her mother was, never stopping too long in one place. So Melanie set about the living room picking up empty plates and used napkins. She hid out in the kitchen for a bit, rearranging the dishes in the dishwasher, but not staying so long that it would catch up with her, whatever
it
was. Sometimes that worked. And sometimes
it
caught her.